


Winter in Berlin

by TCMisthearrow



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 14:12:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TCMisthearrow/pseuds/TCMisthearrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That was the winter that everyone in Berlin had one name on their lips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Evening Walk

That was the winter that everyone in Berlin had one name on their lips. They wouldn’t have told you what it was - perhaps they didn’t even know it themselves - but it was hanging in the air. Everything was being flown in and out those days, but you could ask anyone: something had come in on a flight that wasn’t just food and clothing. It had brought the winter with it, settling in to the fragile city as if there was no reason not to. Both sides of the wall, too; if you could have asked (and you couldn’t), anyone could have told you (but no-one would have).

That was also the winter that Phil Coulson paid his first visit to Berlin. To all intents and purposes fresh out of the academy, he was just set for some office work, a nice cultural exchange, he was telling people. It wasn’t quite the guns-and-explosions mission he’d been hoping to start his career with but even S.H.I.E.L.D had tasted the air out there and the Director wanted more agents on the ground. Things looked shaky with the two Berlins and it couldn’t hurt to keep an eye on it. Several eyes, maybe, and one hand on a revolver. It wasn’t every day that countries fell apart and if things went the way it looked like they would, a peaceful weekend in Berlin would be a nice change. So Phil wasn’t alone, true, and a few months brushing up on his German wouldn’t go amiss either.

Unfortunately, despite the furtive and frantic events in East Berlin and all the way in Moscow, there wasn’t a lot to do for a junior operative of a top-secret agency besides sample the cuisine and practise conversational phrases, and that was how Phil found himself in a slightly dingy café with a coffee that tasted a lot like his grandmother’s dishwater, trying to make sense of a menu and looking up at the chilled metal sky. Christmas had come and gone and he was getting tired of this blocky city, cut off from its country, eking out an existence based on scraps and determination. At the office, which was cold and wet, he read terrible novels and argued with other agents about what might be happening on the other side of the wall, and the streets weren’t much better, but at least out here he could get a feel for this city, for its people. Admittedly, when they spoke fast he couldn’t understand much, but the gossip was riper than what came in dry files from the West every week.

Apparently, someone had been seen crossing the death strip. A man in a mask was running around the city at night and no border guards could take him down. They didn’t even fire. No-one was going missing, no-one was dying, but sometimes that could be enough. Especially here, where people were so tired of the disappearances. It looked like those might finally be coming to an end, so a man dressed in black, crawling around the east and west alike, was setting people on edge.

Phil had heard the story in the café, like every other piece of intel he’d brought back to the office, but he knew it sounded like a tall story - the men he’d heard it from had been discussing whether this figure could be a hero or villain, but Coulson knew that neither of those had truly existed since Captain Rogers went in the ice in the forties. All that was left was soldiers. Even so, he didn’t let anyone else in S.H.I.E.L.D know what he’d heard. That wasn’t how things were done in this Germany, and when in Berlin, Coulson did as the Germans do. He wrote it on his hand, though, just in case it came up - _Soldat._ That was the German word and from then on it was how he thought of this figure, a soldier against the grey winter wall.

 

 *

 

There were enough operatives in Berlin that Coulson didn’t have to pull any serious hours, but out of a sort of desperation to see something worth telling his academy friends about, he offered fairly regularly to take the evening stroll, which was what they were calling the usually dull patrol around the edge of the walled city. The most anyone had seen on the evening stroll was a botched crossing attempt, and the agent had told everyone about it the next day, leaving them all resigned and faintly sad that even now, when the iceberg was finally melting, people were still dying in the space between.

That was how Coulson came to be looking at the paving stones instead of the sky when it finally happened. Another cold night was going the same way as the others and his hands were deep in his pockets. There was a pistol strapped to his ankle but it had never been used. He was turning a street corner, just where the wall cut through a residential street, thinking about how since it it had gone up all the people in West Berlin were just as far from home as he was. That was when he heard the shots.

They were back behind him, the way he’d come. Whether he’d missed something when he came through he didn’t know but before he had reconsidered he’d ducked to his ankle and had the small gun in hand, running back towards the shots, which were still echoing off the narrow walls that were everywhere in this part of town. He wasn’t thinking about what he might find when he got there: he wasn’t thinking about anything but his training. He might have been good at the academy but suddenly he knew he was still green. He’d heard a story once about Pym coming to Berlin and tangling with something unpleasant that’d he’d forgotten until just now. He wasn’t ready for any of that. It was only a small gun, really.

Rounding the corner did nothing to illuminate him on what was going on. He could see a guard tower on the other side of the wall and wondered if they’d fired, but he’d heard no shouts or voices, or footsteps running to pick up the body. He slowed a little, reaching where he guessed a target might have been, and looked around him.

There. On the roof was something. Someone.

It was gone. Phil knew instantly that he had to follow this thing as far as it went. Running into an open doorway, he found a stairwell and sooner than he’d thought he was on the roof. This building was only a few stories but he could see his way on to the adjoining apartment block, and from there he’d be able to see better. Unless the figure had gone back inside - unlikely - he’d spot it from up there. Not stumbling, Coulson jumped a small gap and scrambled onto the next roof, just in time to see a dark figure jumping away, hurdling across an entire street in one bound. A torch held by someone in the street caught metal in its beam for half a second and then the figure was gone.

There was no way he could follow that. Too fast, too clever. The city below him, Phil slumped against a wall and thought for just a second of how easy it had all seemed during training. Even until today, he’d thought he knew what he was doing, but now he knew that this job was more than he’d thought. 

He’d thought too that the Cold War had meant men in long jackets handing envelopes to one another, not running around in disguise - that war was over and its heroes dead. But now he knew how green he was. Perhaps he was wrong there.

 


	2. The American

Two long months passed and the steady stream of mumblings from the West Berlin populace started to quieten down. Phil hadn’t told anyone about what he’d seen that night - he didn’t want to get laughed out of the service, but he also didn’t want to get this taken away from him. He was still taking the evening stroll but not as often, still sitting in the café and improving his German. Things were quieter. The transition was going well. It didn’t look like S.H.I.E.L.D would need the same kind of presence in Berlin in a few months.

That gave Coulson only another few months before he was reassigned, unless he wanted a diplomatic job in the newly enlarged Germany. That wasn’t what he’d joined the agency for. He had to chase down a lead, any kind of lead, very soon, unless he wanted this opportunity to go to waste - because that was what it was: an opportunity. The man on the roof probably wasn’t anything on their scale, but it’d be nice to confirm a rumor that had animated the entire city. It wasn’t often you got to prove your detection chops on both sides of the Iron Curtain, especially while it was being torn down.

 

*

 

That glint was bothering him. The torchlight on metal, but not like on a corrugated iron rooftop. He’d climbed the building again, about a month after the incident, and checked every roof; none of them even had iron on them, just blank plastic and cement. That was the new Germany and the metal he’d seen trapped in the torchlight didn’t fit with it. It was like something you might have seen during the war, like a Stark invention, like a weapon... like armor.

Coulson made some discreet enquiries about metalworkers in the city. He started making trips; when he wasn’t in the office, he didn’t always spend his time in the café any more, trying to feel bohemian. He visited virtually every working quarter of the city, some several times. Usually he would keep his collar up and his mouth shut, but he knew that people around here were all used enough to strangers with accented German raking over their ashes, so the odd question here and there wouldn’t be too misplaced. He didn’t know what he was hoping for, but he did it anyway, making sure to do this right, like he’d been taught at the academy: _Expect nothing. Be prepared for anything_. It was pithy but he already knew that it worked.

There came a time, of course, when every cinder had cooled, and there was nowhere else for him to look. He kept paying visits, trying to strike up the odd relationship with a manager, a repairman, anyone that might ring him up if they heard something he hadn’t. But it seemed that being used to questions was a different matter to being forthcoming about their answers; most he spoke to were curt, albeit polite, and not too chatty. Clearly, chat was for cafés like his over coffee, light conversation for the Bräuhaus over beers, not the workshop or the shaded street. Phil almost wished he could bring a few especially flighty-looking characters into an interview room, but he didn’t want to waste S.H.I.E.L.D resources over any Tom, Dick or Franz.

For weeks on end, he heard nothing, and then, on a quiet Tuesday, while he was sitting at his usual table in the café, he was approached by a thin man in overalls. Coulson didn’t look up until the man asked:

‘You are Philip? The American?’ Coulson nodded.

‘Phil Coulson, sir.’

‘Kommen Sie mit. Let us walk.’

Phil got up and followed the man out of the café into the street. Together, they walked to a newspaper stand, where the man bought the Süddeutsche Zeitung, folding it under his arm as they ambled along the street. Coulson was on the point of asking what they were doing when the man spoke.

‘I work in a metalworks on the edge of the Western sector. Since a few days I heard that there is an American poking around, asking workers if they have seen anything strange. I waited and thought about it. Now am I here, and you are there. You are that American.’ They kept walking, the man in thoughtful silence.

‘One night I am working late. This is not odd; there are in this city lots of people who need something from our workshop very fast, and we are proud that we get it to them. I am working on a - what I am working on is not important. But I finish and go home. As I unlock my front door in just such a way as not to wake my sleeping wife, I realize I have left some money behind. I will need the money in the next morning, so I walk back; it is not far from my house, the workshop. So I walk there. The door is open. It is not broken; I only know that I myself locked it before leaving. I go in. At first I see nothing, but I hear: one of the machines is on. It makes a... keening noise. I recognise it. But I know without looking that none of the jobs we have requires that specific machine. So I go over to it. And there is there a man, crouching down. The way he is holding himself, the metal, the arc of fire we use to shape the metal. It looks like he is the metal himself.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The metal - it looks like he himself is made from it. But I know this is impossible.’

‘Lots of things are impossible, sir,’ said Coulson. ‘Like taking a weak man from New York and building him into the greatest fighting machine on the Western Front.’

‘This is true. But I am interrupting myself. The machine is very loud, so this man does not hear me until I am behind him. But when he does hear me he turns himself around and looks at me like he has never seen a man before.’

As he said this, the man slowed his walk. It was then that Coulson noticed how old this man seemed, and he pointed to a seat left in the street by movers - lots of people were pretty keen to get out of Berlin before German society rearranged itself again. The man sat down gratefully, examining his fingers pensively.

‘Herr Coulson, I am a German. This fighting man you speak of, I saw him once - I was the only one of my brothers old enough to be sent, and one had to go when they called one. I was very young then. It seems a very long time ago. But when I think of the man I saw on that night, it makes me think of what I saw then. The fighting man that used to be weak; you could see that on his face. Many among my friends are dead because of him. And seeing that man that night, he had the same face. That he had been made a soldier.’  
Coulson was beginning to feel more confused than he might have expected.

‘What are you telling me, sir? Was the man a soldier?’

This earned him a grave look from the aging metalworker.

‘Who is there left alive in Europe who has not been a soldier?’


	3. The File

Dead ends. It was all dead ends. Nothing but ghost stories and urban legends.

At least, Coulson thought, it had been a diversion. Berlin was fascinating, sure, and his German was now first-class, but it hadn’t been quite the guns-blazing adventure he’d hoped for on his first real mission. There had been too much wandering around with his hands in his pockets, outside in the harsh European winter. Maybe, he mused, that was why they’d called it the Cold War.

The office was packed up. The wall was coming down - Phil had watched it. They’d taken the first few bricks out, and everyone had cheered. He had sighed, knowing his time was up. Even the top brass in Washington knew that if this country was going to have the fresh start it needed, it couldn’t be done with a field office of one of the West’s most secretive organisations slap-bang in the middle of the capital. That meant shutting up shop, scattering the agents, making sure they had a foothold but nothing more. Maybe in nine months, they’d send out a fresh batch to form a new unified German office. But espionage of the new kind meant training, and training meant time, so they’d pulled the plug on Berlin for now. Which meant, in its turn, that Phil was going back to the US. He was giving up on the ghost.

The field report that landed on his desk the week before he left the city was, therefore, a surprise to Phil. He’d never mentioned the rooftop figure to anyone; no-one at the office - which was now just so many crates and clear desks - had known about his enquiries. He’d kept everything discreet, like he’d been trained: for Coulson, his training didn’t stop when he hung up his suit jacket. He was pretty sure, in fact, that no-one at the office even knew the first thing about him. But the file was for him. It had his name on it, and files did not have the name of a low-ranking agent on them because the Director liked to get the know the rookies. Someone knew. And Phil didn’t know who they were. All he knew was that it was on his desk when he came in to pack up, and there was no-one else in the office.

Really, there was only one thing to do, and that was open the file. It had been typed, without any corrections, with the kind of typewriter that had already become unfashionable. The entire file ran to no more than three pages, and it told Phil almost nothing. The names of the agents who had gathered the data within it had been redacted, like much of the contents. There was only one paragraph left untouched, and it was this paragraph that interested Phil the most.

 

_Almost all sightings of the subject have occurred within a hostile situation, and the subject is always alone. In a military engagement, the subject displays immense physical and tactical prowess, on a par with the surviving subjects of the wartime Super-Soldier program. In the sole reported sighting of the subject outside of this context, however, the subject appeared confused and listless. This suggests that, if the subject is a graduate of a similar program suspected to have been devised by the Soviets, their success has been limited, and resulted in some kind of psychological damage to the subject._

 

Where to start on that? It seemed like the report was more speculation than data: a Soviet super-soldier? The idea was hard to swallow. And if he was here - now - then what? What could that mean.

_Their success has been limited, and resulted in some kind of psychological damage to the subject._ If this really had been the man he’d seen that night... it explained something, at least. Phil dropped the thin file into his briefcase and went out, leaving his meagre possessions in the office. Night had already fallen, fast and hard as it did in Berlin. There were covert flights shipping agents from every conceivable agency out of the city under the cover of darkness. Phill would be on one of them soon, but here was a question on his mind that he had to answer: _If I were a soldier in a city that was no longer at war with itself, where would I hide?_

The file contained precious few hints in that direction, but Coulson’s mind was whirring now, attaching what he’d seen to what someone had seen fit to tell him. Phrases like ‘military engagement’ and ‘hostile situation’, contrasted with ‘confused and listless’, ‘psychological damage’. The ironmongery. The glint of steel. A Super-Soldier that had outlived the war that built him. Berlin, the city of rubble. Coulson knew where to go.

 

*

 

In Grunewald, in the Western half of Berlin, there is a strange heap of rubble and slag that the locals call the Devil’s Mountain. As the tallest hill in Berlin, when the US Government started listening in on transmissions from the East, they built their listening station right on top of it, using its height to try and peer over the wall. With the close of open hostility and the wall’s demise, the station was decomissioned, but left still standing, looming over the town. Phil Coulson was climbing the hill in the darkness, picking over stones dumped there from forty years of waste. He knew that atop the hill were the domes, empty and untouched: perfect for a man out of time to hide from the world.

By the time he reached the top, there was no natural light at all, but Phil didn’t want to risk the torchlight just yet, so he moved slowly towards the domes, half-blind, with a hand on his revolver. There was a chain around the doors to the complex, but someone had smashed the lock on them. He moved inside, through breezeblock corridors, feeling the cold air from the top of the hill blowing in through smashed windows and unsealed doorframes. The first dome, the smallest: empty. Rubble, listening technology, but nothing else. Every step he took he looked about him, trying to guard for the tell-tale flash of metal. It was a longer walk to the next two domes, which were slightly taller than the first. Each was empty, the same as the first.

That left one more, slightly further off. Phil was aware of the sensation of something drawing near, like breath on his neck, but he shrugged it away. No-one at the office would like the idea of him doing this - now that he was doing it, he didn’t think that he liked it too much either. A manhole cover lay on the floor a little distance from what looked like a drillshaft, and he wondered what the Americans had really been up to here. But the staircase was in front of him, stretching up and away, and he took it, almost automatically. The space occupied by the stairs was like a lift shaft, wide, central to the building, but pitch black. The stairs were uneven, but Phil took them two at a time, with his gun resting flat in his hand. He couldn’t see to aim it, and he didn’t think it would do him much good anyway.

The top of the staircase. The great white dome stretched above him, grimy, but still brilliantly white underneath, the moonlight shining through it. Coulson made for the edge of the dome, and slowly circled the space, before spiralling inwards, trying to cover every inch of ground. There was something in front of him.

He bent down to look at it. It was cool to the touch, and looked like metal, but the shape was that of shattered glass. A little further on was another piece, and further still were several more. He collected them in his pockets, wondering what they might point to, following the trail - back towards the staircase. He turned the torch on to guide himself back down, satisfied and irritated that his intuition - little more than a hunch - had been wrong. He descended again, feeling the cold draughts of the wind again, and wondering how far back in his trail he needed to go to get to the bottom of this.

When he reached ground floor again, he realised, with terrible certainity. He saw the manhole cover again, and remembered why they called it the Devil’s Mountain.

You can never get to the bottom by going up. You have to go down.


	4. The Solider

The ladder went a long way into a tunnel with just enough room for Coulson’s back to brush against the other side. There was no light except the torch between his teeth, which showed him only the rungs in front of him. He had only the vaguest idea of what lay below him: an abandoned military school of some kind, never destroyed but just covered. The soldier was somewhere in the complex, most probably, but what else might have been waiting for him he couldn’t guess.

Eventually he reached the bottom, and the tunnel widened into a small cave. Casting the torch beam about he found that the cave led to another, more room-like cave, with square walls and a well-supported roof. Evidently the old buildings underneath the rubble were sturdy. The floors, though, were little more than brushed dirt, and the holes where the windows would have been were haphazardly bricked up with pieces of rubble. Moving into the next room, Phil saw that the whole structure was held together by little more than gravity, with a dose of sturdy Nazi architecture for good measure. _Damn it,_ he thought. _How did we not know this was here? This is exactly the kind of thing S.H.I.E.L.D is meant to know._ Thinking of S.H.I.E.L.D pushed his train of thought back to what he’d learnt in training, and reminded him that he was meant ot be here for more than his own satisfaction. He couldn’t wander about aimlessly until he bumped into a highly trained killer - he had to be methodical, gather information.

The next room was as empty as the first, but several doorways led out of it, one with the door hanging off its hinges. It didn’t take a great detective to know to go through that one. There was no way to cover his entrance to the room, particularly with the bright flashlight in the dim tunnels, so Phil just went in, hoping for the best.

There was something in the middle of the room - he couldn’t tell what. The room was bigger than the ones before, maybe a mess hall or something, from the benches strewn across the space. What was that, in the middle? He could see the shadow against the back wall, stretched montrously by the distant torchbeam into the proportions of a figure out of Greek mythology. Coming closer, the shape resolved into a figure: a child? No, not a child, a man, the soldier, hunched down unmoving amongst the rubble. There was that glint again, like on the rooftop. Closer still. A short distance from the feet were the ashes of several small fires - he’d been here a while. Why wasn’t he moving? Phil was close enough now to make out long hair, pulled back, and something obscuring the face. The torch beam shone on something of bright metal, briefly blinding Phil. Why wasn’t he moving? He was wearing ome kind of body armour, maybe, like he’d thought on the roof, that was the glint. Why wasn’t he moving?

Phil was now only a few feet from the man. He still hadn’t moved. Why not? He started to round the figure and stumbled on a rock. It clacked against its neighbour, horribly loud in the silent cave.

That was it, the man was up and facing Phil, like a live wire switched on. He was blinking, as though he’d just woken. _Oh, god. This is it._ But look at those eyes... they were so hard, icy, and fixed right on Phil. The distance between the two men was easily coverable in less than a second, but there was no movement. Phil couldn’t turn away, and didn’t trust himself to back off slowly. He had no idea what the man opposite was thinking. If he was thinking at all. A respirator of some kind was covering the lower half of his face. In the empty silence they could hear each other breathing.

The seconds started to stretch like shadows on the wall.

It’s hard to say what happened next. When Coulson tried to recall it for the field report, he couldn’t fit all the moments into an order that made sense. He’d thought the man would go for him, and maybe he did. They weren’t facing each other any more. A hand gripped his throat, just for a second, nothing more, feeling almost tentative. Then it was gone: the man was several feet away. Phil was running, away. The eyes - it was like he was still staring into them. So cold and so blue. There was almost nothing human in them at all. He remembered the file - _success has been limited_. Maybe all that was human was the shell. The torch was knocked to the floor. The torch flickered out. Phil was feeling for the walls, trying to get away, and the torch flickered back into life a second later. Only Phil was left in the room.

He didn’t think there would be anything else to find in the complex, but he checked anyway, making a thorough sweep. There were marks on the floor of some rooms where heavy objects had pushed down into the dirt. Seeing them, Coulson knew he had to call this in, whatever it was: he didn’t understand, but maybe whoever had put the file on his desk would. He climbed the tight ladder again and radioed the bureau. Someone would be over in under an hour. The adventure was over.

 

*

 

‘So, Agent Coulson. You’ve told us what you saw in Berlin.’

‘I have, sir.’

‘And it’s all very interesting.’

‘Should I be saying _thank you_ , sir?’

The hint of a smile. ‘I suppose you should. But I have a question of my own.’

‘Is that why I’m here today, sir?

‘You ask a lot of questions, agent.’

‘I was trained to, sir.’

‘I see. But like I said, I have a question. Why?’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir.’

‘Well, you’ve told us what you saw, and how it went down. And the fact that you’d been pursuing this intelligence on your own for quite some time. And I don’t have a problem with that - in fact I think that’s the mark of a smooth operator. I can see that the intel didn’t demand the resources of the bureau on the strength of what you saw, but it’s a smart man that follows up regardless. But I can’t read the file to find out what made you do it.’

‘I guess I’m just a smart man, sir.’

‘Don’t toe the line with me, agent. Why did you do it?’

‘As I said earlier, I was trained to.’

‘That’s a funny thing to say, Agent Coulson, because we don’t train our operatives to act unthinkingly. We train them to... shape their motivations towards those of the agency.’

‘Meaning that I did what I did for me first, and then for S.H.I.E.L.D.?’

No reaction.

‘I guess that... I thought I saw something that interested the child in me, sir.’

‘That’s a very qualified sentence, agent.’

‘I would imagine that if I explained further, it would sound silly.’

‘If you knew what I’d been involved with over the course of my time with this agency, you wouldn’t be telling me about _silly_. Try me.’

‘Well, at the risk of telling you something that you already saw in my file, sir, I had something of a childhood hero. Captain America.’

‘Captain Rogers was a hero to many, Agent Coulson. The point?’

‘He was, sir, but I was a real obsessive. A proper comic book nerd, in a lot of ways. It wasn’t just the good Captain that I adored, it was the whole circle.’

‘You’re referring to the rest of his unit? The so-called Howling Commandos?’

‘Yes, sir. Some of their work, I gather, laid the foundations for the SSR, and later our own agency. I did have a favourite, though. He had no powers, no gimmick, he was just - just a good man, doing the right thing. Regrettably, the war was no place for a good man. He was killed in action, the only one of the Commandos to fall in combat.’

‘Barnes.’

‘Barnes.’

‘Am I to assume, then, that when you _saw something that interested the child in you_ , you saw the long-dead Corporal James Barnes?’

‘As I said, I thought it would sound silly, sir.’

Now he stands up, leaving Coulson seated.

‘You’re a fine agent, Coulson, but I suggest you keep that kind of thing to yourself. I’ve not seen someone laughed out of the agency before, but with that kind of thinking...’

He was gone. Phil was still at the table, thinking of those cold blue eyes. So little humanity in them, and so much ice.


End file.
